Page 88 of Slashed Bonds

He doesn’t say a word about it. He goes back to the hangers.

Thank fuck.

Because I don’t enjoy being wrong, and I enjoy it less when I’ve been caught lying to get something, and the something I was lying to get was, if we’re being plain about it, his cock.

Or…

Maybe not.

I turn the thought over while I chew.

Maybe I want the sex because sex is a transaction, and I understand transactions. I give, he gives, the ledger balances, we go back to our lives. That’s been the whole architecture of us. Two years of it. Neat.

And this…

This is a plate of cheese on a made bed in a clean room, and nobody’s asked me for anything.

It sits wrong. Like a shoe on the wrong foot. Like being handed a gift by someone who isn’t expecting a thank-you.

Being in his space, this curated, this precise, every book flush and every hanger aligned, makes me feel like an oddball who wandered in off the street. Something that doesn’t belong here unless it’s useful. Unless it’s paying its way.

Old wiring. I know where it came from. Knowing doesn’t cut it.

“You’re mine.”

I lift my head.

He’s turned from the rack.

He’s been watching me, I realize.

Watching me go quiet. Watching my face do whatever my face does when the wiring kicks in, and he’s read it, and he’s said the one sentence designed to short it out.

“What’s mine is always taken care of.”

Low. Even.

Not a performance.

“Always secure. Always feels like they’re at home.” He looks away as he says the last part, toward the window, and there’s something in it that sounds like a man reading a rule off a card he wrote for himself a long time ago. “Don’t think otherwise.”

He’s reading my mind.

That’s what it feels like. It’s what it’s felt like for two years, across a room with a mask on, and it frightens me now more than it did then, because then I could pretend it was the mask. That he was guessing. That anyone could guess.

He isn’t guessing.

He’s got the book open. He’s on the page with my darkest handwriting and he’s reading it out loud in a level voice like it’s a grocery list.

I swallow the lump in my throat.

It doesn’t go far.

“So we’re not fucking?”

He leaves the rack.

Crosses the room in four strides and sits down on the bed beside me, close enough that the mattress tips and the plate slides an inch toward him. He reaches past me, picks up a slice of pepperoni, and puts it in his mouth.